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Canonical To Release Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS 'Xenial Xerus' Tomorrow (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical announced today that it will be releasing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Thursday, April 21. The sixth major release of Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) features the new 'snap' package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. "The addition of 'snaps' for faster and simpler updates, and the LXD container hypervisor for ultra-fast and ultra-dense cloud computing demonstrate a commitment to customer needs that sets Ubuntu apart as the platform for innovation and scale," said Dustin Kirkland who leads platform strategy at Canonical. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS introduces a new application format, the 'snap', which can be installed alongside traditional deb packages. The snap format is much easier to secure and much easier to produce, and offers operational benefits for organizations managing many Ubuntu devices, which will bring more robust updates and more secure applications across all form factors from phone to cloud.
Having one central version and each app having its version both have pros and cons. The pros for each are both good, so the pendulum keeps swinging back and fourth. It will continue to do so until someone makes the effort to get both supported in an elegant way where everything is shared by default but programs with issues can be easily and automatically converted to the other way.
From a developer's perspective, if your source control tree doesn't include every library you're using you're doing it wrong. Anyone should be able to checkout your code and run a single command to do a build. The only dependency should be the build tool (even better if there aren't any dependencies).
From a system admin's perspective, trying to manage every program's libraries is a nightmare and wastes disk space.
People who don't understand the pros and cons keep building system ontop of system to switch their current method to the one. They don't bother to consider why their current exists the way it does and instead only look at the pros of the new system. "I'm smarter than the guy before me, so we must do it this 'new' way." Most developers have no respect for current designs and know nothing about how we got there. For instance, almost no software follows the original OOP design. What people program now is a bastardization of the original principles. How is OOP on topic? The original OO design requires programs to include their own copies of libraries.